Elizabeth
Bishop is one of the most famous and beloved American poets, and the
publication of her unpublished papers was just a question of time. You can
debate as long as you like about the pros and cons of releasing works
unsanctioned by so fastidious an author, but who could expect the working
draftsof such an eminent poet to remain in the archives forever?
The large trove of Bishop’s papers in the Vassar College archive was
waiting only for the right person to undertake the difficult task of
preparing it for publication. The New Yorker poetry editor Alice
Quinn has picked up the gauntlet, and although the result of such an
ambitious project can hardly be flawless, readers will be grateful not
only for the material this edition brings them, but also for the way the
editor presents it.

The almost four-hundred-page volume Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.
Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and is formidable from the start. One is
not quite sure what to expect, and the editor’s introduction and her
“Note on the Text” do not afford much help. The introduction offers
general information on the archival sources (with quotes and comments,
many of which reappear in the endnotes), explains the problems of dating
and ordering the poems, and very briefly comments on the transcription of
the manuscripts and the occasional use of facsimiles. Only the last
sentence hints at the editor’s overall goal: “It is my hope that this
book will provide an adventure for readers, who love the established
canon, enabling them to hear echoes and make connections based on their
own intuitions and close reading of both the finished and the unfinished
poems.” “A Note on the Text” gives some more information on the
manuscripts, dating, and editing of the drafts. However, this addendum
fails to clarify the books’ genre, which readers must decide on their
own. In fact, deferring such choices to the readers themselves seems the
editor’s conscious decision and her basic method throughout the book.

It takes some time
for the reader to realize what the book is not: first, it is not a new
book by Elizabeth Bishop. As all the critics agree, the poems included
here do not reach the high standards of Bishop’s published poetry, and
some of them are even positively bad, or rather not poems at all. With
some texts it might have been Bishop’s restraint in making personal
matters public that prevented them from publication, but in most cases it
is clear that her self-censorship was based on the quality of the drafts.
If the reader hopes to find as yet undiscovered masterpieces that could
stand side by side with poems like “The Moose” or “At the Fishhouses”,
they will be disappointed.

Also to be disappointed are readers who expect a critical edition of the
unpublished manuscripts (in spite of the extensive notes forming about
one-third of the book). The volume contains a large selection of drafts
and fragments of poems, but it is not exhaustive. The introductory note on
the contents states: “I have sought to present a thoroughly
representative selection of the draft material in the archive. I have not
reproduced all of Bishop’s uncollected juvenilia or work that is
restrictively fragmentary, that does not indicate to a certain degree
something of her artistic ambition for it or otherwise command interest
because of its biographical significance”, but Quinn does not specify
how much has been left out, or what the exact criteria of selection were.
A critical edition would have to be much more detailed on these points, as
well as on the extent of editorial interventions in the manuscripts.
Neither does Quinn defend her rationaleto print some texts only in
facsimiles, whereas the majority is transcribed and edited. (The editor
only says that “some facsimiles are included to illustrate the range of
manuscript material”.)

The book offers much critical insight into Bishop’s poetic method and
suggests interpretations of many of the poems presented, although it is
not a scholarly monograph, and is not intended as such. Quinn’s
intention as an editor is to be as invisible as possible. Her main task is
to stand behind Bishop and make the poet’s work show at its best. Quinn
tries to present the texts and contexts as starkly as possible, but to
control this starkness so it does not destroy the reader’s pleasure. In
the case of an archive containing more that 3.500 pages of drafts, notes
and fragments, the editor’s intervention necessarily must be radical.
Despite all her efforts, the editor cannot but interpret, even though she
does it in the least intrusive way—by picking and showing.

Rather than a book by Elizabeth Bishop, the “new Bishop book”
can be seen as a book about Elizabeth Bishop. The reader learns
about Bishop’s creative process, about her poetics, and about her life
from 180 pages of drafts/poems followed by some 60 pages of the appendix,
and, perhaps most importantly, from more than 100 pages of notes. The
texts are ordered more or less chronologically (the dating of many is
uncertain: starting with the early drafts of poems influenced by the
metaphysical poets and the English Romantics; going through the drafts
found in the notebooks Bishop kept when living in Key West; moving to
Brazil, where the theme of the poet’s childhood in Nova Scotia emerges
among poems inspired by the exotic Brazilian landscapes; taking us to
places Bishop traveled to, broaching themes and motives that surfaced in
her collected poems, or lurked as unrealized possibilities in her
notebooks. About twenty texts are reproduced in facsimiles, some
accompanied by a transcription of another version of the poem, some not.

A transcription of those photocopied drafts would be helpful, as some are
hard to decipher—Bishop’s handwriting is famously illegible, and even
some of the typed drafts make a challenging, if not impossible read. The
typed draft of the two-page poem “In a Room,” reproduced only in a
facsimile, includes barely legible handwritten notes; worse, the second
page is slightly crumpled in the middle, making one line completely
illegible. Finally, the facsimile pages with the notes for “Aubade and
Elegy” are cut on the sides, and the endings of some words are missing;
the last of the three pages is genuinely maimed compared to the original
typescript—for some inexplicable reason, the side and the bottom
of the page have been cut. As a result, several words are missing at the
start of each line (we have “your hands in the dirt” instead of “and
put only your hands in the dirt”, or “e slowed to that of the rock”
instead of “no—your life slowed to that of the rock”, etc), and some
six lines have completely disappeared. One expects a facsimile to be an
exact copy of the original, and believes one can trust it fully. However,
here the facsimile is actually more fragmentary than the fragment it
represents. The reliance on the facsimile can lead the reader (or the
reviewer) to think that the lines are unfinished; indeed, they break off
suddenly in the middle of a sentence. In the original version, these lines
continue, making perfect sense. The draft is chaotic and fragmentary, but
much less so than it would appear from the facsimile.

On the other hand, it is the facsimiles, particularly those drafts where
later changes can be seen, which offer the reader one of the most
interesting insights into Bishop’s creative method. In the corrections
and changes she made, we can examine the way she worked, the way she
slowly moved the poem from a more or less prosaic set of ideas, often very
personal and emotional, towards a less direct, “cleaner”, more
economical and controlled shape. An excellent example of this
development—from the prosaic draft at the beginning to the perfect poem
at the end—is the villanelle “One Art” and its sixteen drafts
included in the “Appendix”. Bishop
scholars have commented on the creative process of this poem; now readers
can see for themselves the work underlying perhaps the best villanelle
ever produced in English. The efforts at control show themselves not only
in the gradual shaping and polishing of the form (some of the drafts
consist only of words grouped to fill the rhyming pattern), but also in
the development of the poem’s argument. In the first drafts, the speaker
lists things whose loss she has mastered (gradually introducing the things
we know from the definitive published version), only to end up contrasting
them to the loss of the loved one, which is hard to master and is
a disaster. The fragmentary note at the end of the “Draft 1”
(which is more a page of notes than a real draft): “He who loseth his
life, etc.—but he who / loses his love—neever [sic], no never never
never again—” seems to suggest that no loss is final or fatal
but the loss of love (with a reference to Matthew 10:39: “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it”), and
the final lines up to the “Draft 12” say the same—“but this loss
is (Go on! write it!) is disaster”. But the contrast between all the
mastered losses and the disaster of losing one’s love eventually
disappears, giving way to the famous

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The fascinating thing here is that the original emotion seems to pervade
the final version although the words are hiding it. We are told that
losing the loved one is not hard to master, and that it only looks
like disaster, but the implicit emotion (expressed in the first drafts)
breaks through toexplicit statement, creating the unique effect of
a desperate struggle for control over the overwhelming pain. The final
poem is like a palimpsest, with the original drafts still visible through
it, even for a person who has never seen them. Rather than constituting a
rawdiscovery, the drafts confirm what we always intuited.

As another instance of the movement towards control, see the facsimile of
the typed draft of “Aubade and Elegy”, Bishop’s unfinished (and, in
fact, barely started) elegy for her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares. Here,
Bishop systematically crossed out the second-person pronouns, making the
lines more oblique and general, adding an element of mystery (which,
according to a text from the appendix, Bishop considered one of three
qualities she admired in good poetry—together with accuracy and
spontaneity), moving them from a personal lament to a universal plane:

For perhaps the tenth time the tenth time the tenth time today

and
still early morning I go under the crashing wave of your death

I
go under the wave the black wave of your death

Your
o [n]Not there! & not there! I see only
small hands in the dirt

transplanting
sweet williams, tamping them down

Dirt
on your hands, on your rings, nothing more than that

but not more than that –

The
personal grief at “your death” changes into the immense universal
horror of “death”—the small hands seem almost ghostlike, with no
person, no body attached.

The fragmentary drafts of “Aubade and Elegy” similarly hint at how
Bishop’s inspiration worked. The (inaccurate) facsimile page of
“notes” mentioned above contains several lines in Spanish, mixed with
what seems a rather free English translation:

I
want the mint to be weepingYo quiero ser llorando el hortelano

of
the land you occupy (?) and de la tierra que
ocupas y estercolas,

companion
of the soul, so temprano

Nourishing
rains, shells

and
organos my grief without instrument

a las desalentadas amapolas

y siento mas tu muerte que mi vida.

Unfortunately, the editor does not include a note explaining the
strange presence of the Spanish lines, and so the reader might be lead to
believe that the author is Bishop herself. In fact, the lines come from
the famous “Elegy for Ramón Sijé” by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández
(1910-1942), which begins:

[Weeping I want to be the gardener
of the land you occupy and fertilize,
companion of the soul, so early.

Feeding rains, snails
and organs, my pain without an instrument,
to the despondent poppies
I will give your heart for food.
. . .
There’s no expanse bigger than my wound,
I weep over my misery and its allies
and I lament your death more than my life.]

Apparently Bishop heard an echo of her own grief in thoselines
(and in a language she was not quite fluent in) and, moreover, that the
oddly macaronic fragment emerged in the process of her search for anexpression
of her pain and loss. Hernández’s style is not akin to Bishop’s at
all: it is full of emotion and passion, abundant with rhetoric and big
romantic gestures (later in the poem, he wants to dig the earth with his
teeth and kiss the noble skull of his dead friend). Yet when trying to
find her own words and images for the elegy, she resorts to him for
inspiration, and she seems to have had his poem in mind beneath her own
images of coffee, and of hands planting flowers. The final shape for the
poem was never found, and we can only assume that had Bishop finished her
elegy, the drafts would have followed a similar track as the drafts of
“One Art”. It is tempting to imagine a poem written in the highly
controlled, restrained tone of Bishop’s masterpieces, but with all the
heartbreaking emotion of Hernández’s
elegy hidden in it.

Unlike the facsimiles, the transcribed and edited drafts—and
these form the larger part of the book—do not let us catch direct
glimpses of the writing process. They offer pleasures and discoveries of a
slightly different kind. Few of the poems are satisfactory as wholes
(though there are exceptions), but the reader keeps finding beautiful
images scattered through the texts, accurate descriptions, flashes of wit,
precise observations that echo some of the collected poems, but also show
the range of Bishop’s imagination, and suggest the directions it could
take. Bishop readers know the Great Village river, which flows into the
Bay of Fundy, and changes with the tide, from the description in “The
Moose”:

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home

The
same river appears in the draft of a poem for Bishop’s aunt Maud titled
“For M.B.S., buried in Nova Scotia”:

Yes, you are dead now and live
only there, in a little, slightly tip-tilted graveyard
where all of your childhood’s Christmas trees are forgathered
with the present they meant to give,
and your childhood’s river quietly curls at your side
and breathes deep with each tide.

The river is seen as a living creature, almost like a pet sleeping at the
person’s side, breathing peacefully. At the same time, the image of the
tides and the breathing river is almost cosmic, evoking the slow regular
rhythm of nature, the sea endlessly washing the land, of time slowed to
cyclical eternity. The person lying in the cemetery becomespart of
this vast slow rhythm, in perfect harmony with her birthplace.

Another draft written
in Brazil and dealing with Nova Scotia is the short poem “A Short, Slow
Life”:

We lived in a pocket of Time.
It was close, it was warm.
Along the dark seam of the river
the houses, the barns, the two churches,
hid like white crumbs
in a fluff of gray willows and elms,
till Time made one of his gestures;
his nails scratched the shingled roof.
Roughly his hand reached in,
and tumbled us out.

Rather
than a fully-fledged poem, it is one expanded image, and a beautiful one
at that. Four lines sketch this tiny idyllic village and the next four
lines destroy it. The sketch of the village reminds us of the painting
described in “Poem” (“elm trees, low hills, a thin church
steeple”, “some tiny cows, / two brushstrokes each”), and the
perspective of this draft also brings to mind the first paragraph of
Bishop’s most famous story “In the Village”:

A
scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one
hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies,
skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue,
so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more about the
horizon—or is it around the rims of the eyes?—the color of the cloud
of bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something
darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky. The scream hangs
like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the present, and those
years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came
there to live, forever—not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be
the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church
steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.

In all these texts, the speaker’s perspective is similar: the village is
seen in its whole, as if from the outside, all at once—it could be on
the palm of a hand. And the hand actually appears both in “A Short, Slow
Life,” where the Time’s hand grabs the village, and in the story,
where the fingernail flicks the steeple. Rather than an actual village, we
have a toy-model of a village, a picture, an image, a mere memory.

The editor’s notes
deserve a separate comment, as they form a substantial part of the book
and are sometimes more inspiring and illuminating than the drafts
themselves. They comment on the manuscript and other extant versions and
drafts of every poem, occasionally explaining some editorial decisions.
Apart from this basic information, the notes contextualize each poem by
giving the biographical background, quoting extensively from Bishop’s
letters and notebooks, and tracing some of the motifs in other texts by
Bishop. As I said earlier, the editor’s main method seems to be showing
and guiding, not interpreting or explaining. She often quotes from
Bishop’s notebook without explaining the passage’s connection with the
poem, leaving the reader to join the dots. At some points, one has to
struggle hard to imagine what led the editor to include a particular quote
in a note to a particular poem, but generally this method proves engaging.
Quinn does not pretend to offer any systematical critical commentary;
rather, she pluckssmall gems from the vast archive, and offers
them for us to us to enjoy and appreciate. Sometimes it’s just a flicker
of an image: “The leaves of the house-plants on the verandah—slightly
dirty underneath, like the cat’s ears” (a note from Bishop’s Key
West notebook), sometimes a witty observation: “Translating poetry is
like trying to put your feet into gloves” (from her Ouro Prêto
notebook), sometimes a longer passage from a letter.

Reading the notes is enjoyable, and one often realizes that instead of
going back to the texts of the poems, one continues reading the next note,
as if the text were a kind of literary biography. Which in fact it is. The
roughly chronological order of the poems creates a line on which quotes,
anecdotes, images are draped, sometimes flashing back to a previous text,
sometimes pointing forward, forming a surprisingly coherent overall image
of Bishop’s life of a poet. To view Bishop’s life through her poems
(however unfinished, fragmentary, and imperfect they may be) seems more
appropriate than to read her poems through her life, which is a rather
common approach.

Given the richness of the material, and the care the editor devotes to it,
one is surprised to find unnecessary flaws—apart from the problems with
the facsimiles mentioned above, the absence of indexed titles and first
lines is annoying (even an index of names would be helpful for a better
orientation in the notes), and so does the typo in the numbering of the
sections in the notes (section IV is mistakenly marked as III). A more
detailed introduction explaining clearly the purpose and the method of the
book would spare readers initial confusion and would help them to enjoy
the book fully from the very start. All this may sound finicky and
pedantic, but a reader spoilt by Bishop’s perfectionism tends to expect
nothing less than perfection in a book of her texts.

Going through the Vassar archive is an adventure, and the editor has done
her best to mediate the adventure for everyone who lacks the opportunity
to go there every now and then, and spend hours and hours reading through
the endless boxes of papers, digging for hidden jewels, a sentence here,
an image there. The present book cannot have all the charm of the actual
manuscripts, neither can it give the feeling of intimacy one has sitting
with the boxes full of papers in the silence of the archive, but it
conveys a lot of the pleasures of the archival work. The editor has done a
lot of valuable work for scholars by reading through the enormous number
of papers and giving us to enjoy what she has found there. The texts she
has brought us can never be louder than the restrained graceful voice of
Bishop at her best. But both the drafts and the notes on them will provide
new inspiration for readers and scholars, and will let us enjoy and admire
Bishop’s poetry afresh.